argus

…will use a weapon you’ve probably never even heard of: an electromagnetic pulse.

Here’s a sample scenario.
A frieghter, sailing under the flag of an African country (Sudan, maybe) is making its regular run to New York. Little attention is paid to it, although it does receive cursory notice from the intelligence agencies since its owner’s company has ties, albeit apparently remote ones, to Iranian contacts. When the freighter is about 100 miles out from New York, its crew begins their real mission: the launch of two ballistic missiles, crude by U.S. standards, but made famous during the 1991 Iraq war and known by their trade name as “Scuds”. In particular, these are Scud-Bs, remarkable only for their comparative cheapness and their (directly related) proliferation throughout the world. Scud-Bs have a range of around 180 miles, so New York is already well within the range of the Scuds on our hypothetical freighter — Washington DC might be as well, depending on exactly what route the freighter was on. But these missiles won’t ever touch the ground again.

At 09:12am EST, the terrorists launch the first missile. The launch is immediately detected by NORAD satellites. 6 minutes later, the second missile is launched. U.S. tracking stations are busily plotting the missiles trajectories in real-time, estimating impact locations. It seems obvious: the first missile’s trajectory is towards New York; the second missile’s, towards Washington. Emergency plans are put into effect for the heads of state: the president and other high ranking officials are man-handled into bunkers; a coastline missile launch is the worst possible scenario, since it affords the least amount of evacuation time (although U.S. warplanners had always envisioned scenarios in which the missiles came from USSR submarines, not African-flagged junk freighters).

However, things start to change rapidly. The operators monitoring the missiles’ trajectories notice something odd: as the missiles continue to climb and the impact location becomes more reliably determined (Scud’s are ballistic missiles, meaning their trajectory is determined by straightforward Newtonian physics, and can therefore be fairly accurately projected), the “targets” shift. Instead of New York, it appears that the actual impact location will be to the northwest of Manhattan — far to the northwest, in fact. Same for DC: the impact will be far beyond the city, as if the terrorists vastly overshot their targets in both cases. The flaw here is in the original assumption: that the missiles are carrying nuclear weapons destined to destroy an American city. While the missiles are in fact carrying nuclear warheads (up to an 80 kiloton yield on a Scud-B), no city will be destroyed by their blast.

At 09:23am EST, the terrorists remotely detonate both missiles, the first missile is nearly at its apogee, while the second is still climbing, perhaps 80% to apogee. The nuclear blast is far too high for any significant overpressure to reach the ground. However, as a secondary effect, a nuclear blast also creates a massive burst of powerful radiation up and down the spectrum; some of it is visible as light, some as heat. This massive burst is known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), and it’s effects are devastating. Forget the plot device of “Oceans 11″, wherein an EMP was used to temporarily blackout the entire city of Las Vegas — the scene was mostly accurate, except for once crucial difference: an EMP would destroy any and all non-hardened electrical device close enough to the origin of the pulse. In the movie, Las Vegas lights back up again and George Clooney & Co. continue on in their tomfoolery. In our scenario, things are much different.

The EMP moves outward from the blasts at the speed of light, so it reaches the ground nearly instantaneously — and its effects are dramatic. Traffic lights go out. Cars are disabled, coming to a halt in the middle of highways. Lights go off. Air conditioners are disabled. Cell phones are disabled. The switching equipment that makes the landline phone system is disabled. Computers are fried, as are the large server computers that run the backbone of the Internet. Water treatment and pumping facilities are rendered useless as the electronics in their pumps are destroyed. Power generation and relay stations are reduced to dark, useless hulks. In short, there is no electronic communication possible: no cell phone, no landline phone, no television. There is no automobile transportation: every modern car that relies on any electronics to function will be disabled, although much older cars *might* still function. Imagine the New England blackout of several years ago multiplied by the entire eastern half of the United States — but with no backup sources of power of any kind, as well as no cars or transportation available in the affected area. Only this time, it’s not a matter of rerouting power from other areas — even if power were rerouted, the infrastructure to relay it has been destroyed, at every level. Months, if not years, would pass before power was able to be distributed again. Perhaps a combination analogy is more appropriate: the New England blackout, followed by the post-Katrina nightmare of looting, lawlessness and chaos. For months.

Meanwhile, the terrorists on the freighter have scuttled their ship — part of their plan all along: with no one to arrest and hold up for the world to see, and no one to trace back to the sponsor country that provided the missiles and the bombs, there will be no way to retaliate. Not that we could respond: our military, political, financial, and most of our communication infrastructure would have been drop-kicked back to the mid 19th century in a matter of minutes. Even our deployed forces wouldn’t immediately have any way of knowing what to do or to whom, even though they would have escaped the immediate effects of the EMP.

There are more than a few analysts who think this is exactly the scenario that Iran is aiming for. It is cheap, deniable, and very very effective. Iran already has all but one of the necessary ingredients to implement such an attack:

1. Access to an army of brainwashed fanatics willing to die to strike at the Great Satan — Iran pretty much single-handedly invented modern terrorism, creating Hezbollah in the early 80s. Hezbollah’s brand of suicide terror attacks have been, from their point of view, astoundingly successful — and if you disagree, consider how compliant the world has been in diplomatically dealing with the PLO/PA and now Hamas;
2. A medium range ballistic missile — Iran has piles of Scud-Bs, including their own modified longer range variant, the Shahab. The EMP approach is even more appealing because it requires even less care given to guidance: there’s no worries about impact location. As long as the missile climbs to a high enough altitude in even remotely the correct vicinity, it’s still lights out;
3. Access to freighters that regularly travel to the U.S. — here I’m less well informed, I’m afraid. I’ve speculated about an African connection, as that doesn’t seem too far fetched; consider the legions of fanatical Muslims engaged in genocide in Sudan and other parts of Africa. Surely the Iranian mullahs could buy off a friendship with such like-minded nutjobs…
4. A nuclear device — thanks to the spineless axis of weasels in Europe, committed to “giving peace a chance” until it gets them annihilated, and the interference of Russia and China, Iran will most likely be in possession of its own nukes within the next 8-18 months. There are no reasons whatsoever to allow Iran to go nuclear. None. If you think you have one, by all means post it. I’d love to gain that sort of insight into my readers :)

Now, everything I’ve been talking about is hypothetical, although I believe it to be highly probable — and if Iran gets nuclear capacity, I’d almost say it’s guaranteed. Before you call up Ted Nugent to see if he has any space on his Montana ranch, consider: all we have to do is prevent Iran from going nuclear. That’s not to say that no one else could pull off an EMP attack, but right now Iran is the leading candidate, with thier unique nexus of conditions (most notably their apocalypse-obsessed president). Unfortunately, there are enough anti-Bushies in this country willing to ignore everything short of Osama bin Laden on their doorstep with an AK47 in their efforts to torpedo Dubya. Or those who think the “imperial U.S.” should stop starting wars. Or that Iran has just as much right as we do to develop nuclear weapons. Whatever the rationale, the result is the same. The net effect is to paralyze the Western world into dithering about and do nothing. Make no mistake: time is most definitely not on our side. Every passing day that the current regime is in power in Iran is one day closer to the mad mullahs having nuclear weapons.

Personally, I don’t think the United States has the cajoneys at this point to pre-emptively hit Iran. I’d love to be wrong, but that’s the way I see it. I think Israel would do it, but they could only do it with some level of support from us (midair refueling, bases to hop from in Iraq, etc.). We’ve become a nation of infighters, where the policy makers and the talking heads are out of touch with the cold hardness of reality.

I just hope it doesn’t take the cold of a post-EMP United States to wake them up.